Ethereum.org Q3 roadmap, Base updates and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #622 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of The Daily refuel I recap the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host and this is Simon says the 13th of July 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so a update on the coinbase vs SEC situation here so Paul Groll the chief legal officer at coinbase has tweeted out today saying we have responded to the SEC statement of intent to move to strike coinbase's defense rooted in the major questions Doctrine abusive discretion Equitable estoppable unclean hands and latches we look forward to addressing the court tomorrow morning and you can see the letter here for yourself and read it I'll link it in the YouTube description below um but you guys know obviously I'm not a lawyer or a legal expert or anything like that so I'm not going to even attempt to break this down I'm sure you

can find some threads of people breaking this down but the reason why I bring it up again is because this is really what it's going to be like for like probably the next couple years between coinbase and the SEC unless the SEC drops their case against coinbase it's going to be this Tit for Tat back and forth exhausting kind of like legal mumbo jumbo speak for a long time um and that's usually how it goes with these cases I mean you can use the Ripple case as an example here of of the SEC going after Ripple that case has been going on for two and a half years now and it's been a lot of back and forth and um you know people went on about the Hinman emails for a very long time and then they came out and it wasn't really the Blockbuster that

everyone thought it was going to be and that kind of uh that kind of thing took a long time to to get to that point and I don't know how long the case is going to continue with ripple versus the SSE or the SEC versus Ripple as I said it's already been two and a half years so you know you could imagine the coinbase case going for that long depending on a number of different things I think you know obviously the SEC could withdraw their case if they if they want to maybe gensla uh you know gets promoted or something and isn't the chair and the next chair that comes in uh you know withdraws the case because it's a waste of resources or whatever other reason it could go either way but if we assume that the case isn't going to be withdrawn then yeah it feels like this

is going to go on for quite a while this kind of back and forth Tit for Tat uh definitely not something that's very exciting for us and definitely something that lawyers are going to make a lot of money on as they always do uh but it's great to see that coinbase is obviously keeping the fight up not backing down and as I've said before they don't have any plans to to back down here so you can read this full response here I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right the ethereum.org website has published their Q3 roadmap so you can check this out on GitHub I'll link it in the YouTube description there is a tldr so they've got a nice little uh I guess graphic here that shows exactly what they're focused on it's similar to vitalik's ethereum roadmap graphic and

the way it's kind of laid out but obviously a lot less a lot less Scopia since this is just Q3 it's not the next 10 years like ethereum roadmap is and you can see they're focusing on a bunch of different uh things across different um vertical CR such as operations design community and more now a friendly reminder that the ethereum.org website while it has a centralized team or I guess like a core team that works at the ethereum foundation that works on it the whole website is open source uh it's meant to be able to be contributed to by anyone so you can literally go to the GitHub you can submit a pull request and contribute in ways that you feel are valuable and uh get it approved and then it's live on the ethereum.org website which is pretty much the first place everyone who googles ethereum will go if

they're new right if you if you literally type ethereum into Google I'll do that right now the first result um you know is ethereum.org here uh and I don't see ads um because I've got ad blocker on Google but the first result is ethereum.org so obviously we want that website to be up to scratch we wanted to have the most up-to-date and reliable information so that people are able to educate themselves on ethereum when they're first learning about it and we want that to happen in not just English but other languages as well and the ethereum.org team has been very focused on translating the website to a bunch of different languages they support a lot of different languages but they obviously need people to to help them translate and contribute especially when new pages come online and maybe new terms and things like that and yeah I

mean this is pretty detailed on GitHub you can go check this out and see what they're focusing on in Q3 but as I said you can get involved here this could become like getting involved in the ethereum.org website and helping to to shape it and helping to educate people this could be like your first stepping stone into the world of ethereum like imagine you start off with contributing to ethereum.org you start getting more involved with the ethereum called contributors you go into like Discord channels in in in the research forums maybe you have aspirations to become a core developer or core researcher and then you use this to kind of build your resume and build your reputation within the community and get to that point where potentially you can join the researchers in uh kind of uh becoming part of uh the the um ethereum roadmap

and contributing to the ethereum road maps which I think is pretty cool so yeah I mean you can go check this out for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh but uh yeah there is a kind of like very Broad Road map here which is great to see and there's a lot happening on the ethereum.org front all right so the uh ethereum Foundation a Reddit AMA happened yesterday I believe or today wherever you are in the world um and you can go check out all the questions and answers now on Reddit which I'll link in the YouTube description below but as I scroll down here as I said there are usually multiple researchers answering the same question you can see this first question was answered by vitalik and then it was also answered by Justin Drake and you can keep scrolling down you've got one

here answered by adamothy who is actually a daily gray a Community member so always great to see him there Mike neuter who I've talked about before as well and yeah I mean all the people that I talk about on the refuel pretty regularly from the research side of things are in here answering these questions and not just giving throw away little answers they're giving very detailed answers and yeah this is fun uh Justin Drake actually uh posed a self question here um so basically he asked himself a question because he wanted to answer this and this was got to do with what he said recently on the bankless podcast that I think a lot of people talk out of context so he said something around not needing decentralization at the I believe operator level because there are cryptographic Primitives that we can

integrate into ethereum that can give us decentralization without uh at the cryptographic level at the the tech level and um you're not having to do uh decentralization at the operator level now Justin Drake has expanded on this in this question and answer here uh because uh the way we achieve this is with something called One Shot signatures now I actually spoke to him about this um a little while ago and it's look it's not something that's that's probably close to being implemented in the ethereum network I would say it had to it'd have to be at least a decade out from something that could be ready to be implemented on the ethereum network but essentially the tldr of what one shot signatures are and why they'd be so powerful for ethereum as Justin Drake says yeah one shot signatures are

magical cryptographic signatures where the private key can only sign a single message once shot signatures exist so far only in theory as you can check check out here thanks to quantum physics see what I mean by like at least a decade away the private key is a Quantum superposition which cannot be copied um and which must be measured and therefore destroyed to produce a signature importantly the signatures themselves are normal bits and bytes and one shot signatures do not require Quantum communication between parties and then Justin Drake expands on why this is special and why this actually has massive implications if it works in practice and not just in theory for the ethereum network so essentially we can get rid of slashing we can get rid of double vote and Surround vote slashing conditions completely which is a huge

deal right uh and then we can have perfect finality so instead of relying on economic finality we can have perfect finality that is guaranteed by crypto cryptography and the laws of physics uh next by 51 final finality threshold the threshold of fun finality can be reduced from 66 to 51 pretty good reduction but obviously not um you know not anything significant I guess uh it's not like it's bringing it down to 20 10 finality threshold but still pretty a pretty um big change there instant Q clearing so there wouldn't will be no need for the activation and execute uh cues weak subjectivity no longer applies at least in the default case where finality is reach without the need for an activity leaking trustless liquid staking

restaking free proof of stakes it becomes possible to design proof of stake where restaking is neutered um I don't know uh the details on that in particular I think that that's that's something that would have to be more fleshed out uh routing free lightning one can design a version of lightning Network without any of the routing and liquidity issues which is interesting and proof of location one can design proof of geographical location which uses Network latencies to triangulate the position of an entity without the possibility of for that entity to cheat by having multiple copies of the private key this as I said is pretty bleeding edge cryptography crypto Primitives cryptography Primitives as well as physics and as Justin says here it's

only um I guess like in theory right now this has not been done practically and you can actually read the paper here on one shot signatures and its applications and you can check that out I'll link it in the YouTube description below but this was basically The Wider context around why Justin Drake said what he did on the restaking bankless podcast and I think whenever you see researchers say these things you you really need to assume that they are thinking a very long kind of like um very long term ahead of what the current status is because the whole point of research is to be ahead of the game right it's the be on the bleeding edge it's to be at the point or you know at least a few years out from the current Paradigm of what we're in and

research what can be added to the ethereum road map for example what what can be probably removed from it what is not needed and the further in time of all the more long term you think the better it is because the more prepared you can become now it may be one shot signatures don't go live on the ethereum network for 10 to 15 years maybe I don't ever go live but the thing is is that the research is being done now it's being looked into now it can inform certain design decisions around ethereum it can make ethereum more secure overall just from different kind of research that that bolts onto one shot signatures so it's all positive at the end of the day but yeah when Justin was explaining this to me I was like my mind was absolutely blown I was like dude what

the hell I never even heard of this and you guys are already thinking about how this could apply to ethereum and how it could actually make the ethereum network so much stronger and could potentially make the ethereum network so strong that it becomes pretty much impossible to to take it down from a technical point of view um obviously from a social point of view it's a different thing but this is crazy right guys this is actually insane here um but yeah as I said not not something that's that's close to going live on the network anytime soon but something that that some researchers like Justin Drake are thinking about but anyway you can go check out the rest of the AMA for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right Jesse is uh teasing That Bass is going live soon now you may

uh one day I came to that conclusion considering all he tweeted was a quote tweet of bases um uh a tweet from back in February with five check marks now the reason why I am able to I guess like draw this conclusion is because the five check marks were basically the five steps that uh that um the development team needed to complete on base in order for bass to be ready for mainnet and this has been detailed in the the past and I've gone over this on the refill before so yeah it seems that they've completed all five here which means that we could possibly expect base mainnet to go live very very soon and to put maybe a timeline on that I would not be surprised to see this base mainnet go live between the next

Maybe one to two months I think two months is probably gonna be too long I would say it could happen within the next let's let's say six weeks right let's let's do a middle ground between one to two months let's say it goes live within the next six weeks that is massive guys like I don't think you understand how big that of a deal that is considering that it was a base was not announced that that long ago and this is a huge undertaking for coinbase and at the same time it's going live before 48.44 so they're going to onboard all these users right these users are going to get cheap fees it's probably not going to be as cheap as um as um as as users may like it to be maybe it's 10 cents for a swap or something like that but then 4844 is

going to go live and I'm sure base is going to take advantage of that straight away and fees are going to drop to like subscent and I'm very excited to see what they've decided on when it comes to if they're going to do free usdc transfers or subsidize usdc transfers on base because that will very very quickly get a lot of liquidity onto the base Network and there'll be a lot of people uh essentially uh not only only providing liquidity but using base as a payments Rail and on top of that I know that coinbase has said in the past that they're not going to be doing a base token um and that they're you know there's just not going to be a token altogether but people are still going to speculate that there will be a token and I know I've said before that any project

that doesn't have a token will have a token there are exceptions to that um and and some exceptions are like what base is because bass he's built by coinbase right coinbase already has a it doesn't have a token but it has a stock like um the coin stock right so and on top of that they also have a lot of regulatory uh scrutiny right now so I don't think they're going to be issuing their own token or anything like that but in saying that it could get to a point where if coinbase wants to hand base over to the community and wants to have Community governance then there could be a token so at the end of the day as much as they say that there won't be a token and as much as the the um I guess like incentives and motivations aren't there for there to be

a token you can never roll it out so there is going to be airdrop Farmers right there is going to be people on their airdrop farming and I talked yesterday about how I don't think that's a negative so to speak I do think it has positive externalities but uh at the same time just because bass oh just because coinbase said that bass isn't going to have a token doesn't mean that it won't have a token in the future and that's what the airdrop farmers will be betting on even if the chance is like 0.1 percent people are still going to to bet on that so that's going to drive a lot of activity as well but I think the main driver of activity will be coinbase basically Advertising based to their users and saying hey especially over assets that that coinbase doesn't list they can say to users hey we don't list

this asset but you can go trade it on base and they'll show them how to do that they'll obviously integrate it directly into coinbase wallet which is a very good wallet by the way people are actually surprised by how good of a wallet coinbase wallet is but I've suggested it to a few friends that were using metamask mobile wallet and I said to them they're all complaining about it like oh my God metamask mirror wallet is shocking like the user experience just just isn't there it just feels like the the extension and I said to them why don't you go and try coinbase while and they're like what do you mean coinbase wallet isn't that like even worse I'm like what do you like No And like why do you assume it's worse and they say oh because it's it's coinbase They Don't Really uh they haven't been really

successful with their crypto native products before uh because they uh the nft marketplace didn't really take off I'm like yeah okay but just because the nft marketplace isn't it didn't take off doesn't mean that their wallet isn't good and then they used a while and they're like holy like I didn't even realize it was this it was this good and I'm like yeah okay well now you do now you can use it and I've seen some similar comments around bass people say well coinbase is nft Marketplace failed so what's the stock base from um uh from failing as well it's like well okay there's multiple reasons here one they learned from The nft Experience nft Marketplace experience that's a learning for them and they've taken that on board two the head of Base Jesse is a crypto native he definitely understands

what it takes to make something like this succeed three and L2 is very different to an nft Marketplace there are already so many nft marketplaces out there and and they had already built up a lot of liquidity around them and they had already built up a lot of customer base around them the L2 kind of ecosystem is still ripe because there really isn't that much activity there uh compared to the nft marketplaces especially during the bull market yes we do have you know a couple of big generalized l2s right now such as arbitrimin and optimism and a few others but there is still so much growth to have there so bass is going live at the perfect time I believe you know just before the start of the next bull market I say just before but we're probably like six or 12 months away from from a

proper bull market if I if I had to kind of speculate on that but that's why bass is joining at the right time they'll uh sorry launching at the right time they'll launch they'll get the apps on board they'll get their early users on board they'll get all the liquidity there 4844 will go live they'll take advantage of that and then all these new users that come in if when the bull market happens probably next year they're going to direct those users to base so I think that the timing is right the design of it is right they're using the op stack so they've already got a leg up because of the op stack is already in the wild being used by optimism itself it works everyone knows it works they have a lot of incentives that they can use to get people on there

they have the fact that they don't have a token and they said then there's not going to be a token but no one really believes them so yeah when you when you take all that together it's very different to how they launched their nft Marketplace and really they didn't even put much effort into their nft Marketplace to be honest and they launched it at the kind of tail end of the nft Mania I believe from from memory so so yeah it's all it definitely is all about timing when it comes to these things uh and I think the timing is just right for this so yeah very excited to see base go live uh relatively soon I would after I would estimate within the next six weeks that's my estimation we'll we'll revisit but yeah it feels like it's coming much sooner rather than later

all right keeping on the L2 topic arbitrim has announced phase one of their arbitrim ambassador program and it is now live they said here starting today university-based blockchain clubs and students can apply to represent arbitrim in their local compute communities contribute build their Professional Network and more so you can learn more about this uh by going to this blog post here which has been blocked by my ad blocker which is funny but yeah um I you can go to this blog post here on medium and and check it all out and check out all the details here but the tldr is basically there's two phases of the ambassador program phase one which is open to university-based clubs and students and phase two which is open to individuals Community and Technical which will be going live in Q3 of this

year uh and basically it's a way for different groups of people different groups from different walks of life to get involved with the arbitrim ecosystem such as proposing initiatives for funding by the foundation represent arbitrim as an official Ambassador on your University campus and Beyond fund make valuable contributions to the broader arbitrum ecosystem and organize and host an arbitrim satellite event in your region so it's basically a way to build that arbitrim Army right build that missionary Community around Arboretum and get people built you know developing on arbitrim using it all that all that good stuff there uh but yeah this is this is great I I think that we're going to be seeing more of these Ambassador programs and I like the programs that are focused on

non-speculative stuff because you could say that there are speculative Ambassador programs where essentially you get paid for talking about something or you get points for talking about something and Shilling it or whatever and it doesn't look very organic when it's done like that because it's definitely mercenaries just in it for the money but when you look at it as a as a kind of thing where it's like okay we want to ambassadors on board that can educate people that can get developers on board that can get extra users on board that leads itself to more more missionary than mercenary which you guys know that I'm all about like missionaries uh definitely what you want to have in your ecosystem and community so you can go check out the details of this arbitrim ambassador program I'll link it in the YouTube description below

all right so I talked about starknet a little bit uh yesterday I believe and about how they put their their new Quantum Leap upgrade live uh and for those of you who don't know you can actually track a lot of Stark Nets statistics and metrics on a voyager dot on online which is a starknet block Explorer uh mempool surfer.ethr um the co CTO nevermind put posted a screenshot out today saying a verifying a very satisfying set of stats on voyager.online the network now has much more bandwidth than demand the max TPS recorded all 54.3 was the system clearing out the backlog now it feels like a sleeping giant so yeah the um there's a lot more capacity on Stark net than there was before a lot more ability

to do a lot more TPS and uh it is right before being filled essentially so there's all this space people can build their apps on there uh and kind of fill it up and the thing is is that it's going to get filled up every time as long as there's the demand for it and then they're going to keep increasing it over time and I think that's the proper way to do it I think that a fault a lot of the monolith chains made is that they kind of said okay we do thousands of TPS or we do tens of thousands of TPS yeah okay cool you do you do that obviously ignoring the fact that they sacrifice decentralization to do that but yeah let's just just let's just stay on that topic for a sec it's like yeah okay you do that but like who cares do you have

the demand for that no like the real TPS of your network the actual processed transactions per second is much much lower than what you can handle so why do you have all that capacity when there's no need to have that and it's such an inefficient design because you're still paying for that capacity so let's take uh Solana for example as the quintessential example of a monolithic chain they have all these validators that are expensive to run and those validators are earning Soul tokens right for staking now what do you think is happening to those Souls soul tokens they're being sold to cover the costs the cost wouldn't need to be that high if the network actually didn't just offer all this extra space for years now

that people aren't even taking advantage of and then when people do take advantage of the network Falls over so I'm not trying to pick on Solana here I'm just using it as an example because it's an obvious one to me and and as and and they're the one who advertises that they do like 50 000 TPS and they're real TPS is is is is much lower than advertised I mean if you exclude the voting TPS which which you should because no other blockchain actually includes that the the validator voting I think the last time I checked the actual TPS was like 800 but then you look at the actual transactions taking place and they're not high economic value transactions they're mostly spam so even if you but even if you don't consider that even if you just look at let's just round it up to a thousand TPS you still

have 50 there's still 50 times more capacity than what you actually have and so you're paying for that 50 times more capacity for no reason so it's better to focus on incrementally increasing the TPS that you have and the bandwidth that you have as as the man keeps hitting that ceiling right um because at the end of the day you have to pay for it in some way and if the if the fees are low who you know who's paying for it it's the token holders because the validators that are subsidizing essentially the fees by um running beefy Hardware have to be paid and they have to cover their own costs and to do that they sell the the token they're being paid in um and that is the same concept of like mining for example where the Bitcoin miners have to pay their electricity

bill uh because they um using electricity to mine in order to generate new BTC into into win blocks uh they have to sell it to to pay for it there whereas uh you know with ethereum it's a bit different where staking isn't uh intensive in in Hardware wise or or otherwise because it you can run validators on like a Raspberry Pi for example right so the costs are very very low compared to something like Solana where you have to have like a gigabit connection and you have to have all this bandwidth and all these heart this Hardware in order to run the chain uh in order to keep the chain online as well not falling over uh it's it's a very expensive task so I like the approach that starkman has taken here so kudos to them on that and it comes back to what

I've been saying for a long time now we have the capacity for on these l2s to to and we have probably too much capacity at this point what we need is the demand we need to build better apps we need to build apps that are taking advantage of this capacity otherwise we're just going to have a lot of empty chains and I I think that's a more true for layer ones than layer twos but layer 2's aren't immune to it just because they're a layer two you still need to build an ecosystem you still need to build demand you still need to get people using it and that's what I think a lot of the layer twos are definitely focusing on right now uh but yeah anyway I'm gonna leave that one at that you can check out this for yourself I'll link it in the

YouTube description and below all right xmtp has a massive announcement today so for those of you who don't know what xmtp is it is a secure messaging Network for web3 AKA they're trying to build a decentralized encrypted messaging platform that anyone can use now I should disclose here that I'm investor in them have been an investor for quite a while now but today they announced that they have integrated with coinbase wallets so coinbase wallet has added xmtp and now you can basically go on there and and chat to all of your contacts on coinbase world you can see as I play this video what this looks like so basically it is it's it's directly integrated into the wallet itself you own your charts you can see all the encrypted chats here with

inboxes it has direct integration with things like crypto like look at that you just you send crypto it says sent 10 usdc and it tells you it's on polygon here imagine that being integrated with bass as well right that's that's going to be awesome um and it's all just native crypto you just scan the chat it's all in there there's no kind of like third-party stuff here it's all being done out of the coinbase wallet it's elf which is huge and I think it's huge for coinbase as well because it means that their users are basically becoming more sticky because the coinbase wallet is not only just a wallet now it is a full-blown chat app uh platform too so imagine you know you were kind of talking to someone on on Twitter and said to them hey like uh do you have coinbase wallet I'll send

you some you know I send you some money for for such and such or I'll send you these for such and such and you're able to just do that natively within the wallet uh through an encrypted messaging platform instead of doing it on Twitter and and um I guess like trying to do it by saying okay what's your ethereum address okay what network are you on blah blah with Chromebase while it has the potential to abstract all of that away and imagine I I don't know if they're doing this yet but imagine that coinbaseball integrates with one of these bridging protocols and you said your friend kind of messages you on there and says hey can you send me 10 usdc on arbitrim and you only have 10 usdc on uh I guess like let's just say the polygon POS chain you can basically click a link that says okay send this 10

usdc through uh uh you know through coinbase wallet through the uh the xmtp integration here and get send it to my friend who's on on this chain and then it does that all obstructed away in the background that is the kind of start of Master adoption right there as I mentioned yesterday as well I believe that kind of like one click do multiple things behind the scenes uh experience is exactly what's going to bring on a lot of people into into this ecosystem and I think xmtp going live now is also good timing because as I mentioned before when I'm talking about bass and then coinbase world is going to benefit a lot from base's launch as well so it's just all happening really and it's really great to see it all happening at once it's really great to see all these things being integrated at the same time

and I think this is the start the early very start but the start of some kind of I guess Mass adoption happening or at least the early signs of it here so you can check out this announcement for yourself I'll link the Twitter thread in the YouTube description below all right aginal Finance has a teased that they're launching today so they're launching at 9am eastern time today they're probably already live by the time you're watching this refuel uh but I'm recording this review a little bit earlier today because I'm actually back on the weekly roll up again with Ryan this week so uh I'm going to be recording that a bit later but ajnar for those of you who don't know is a new uh Oracle s uh permissionless lending protocol so they've got they've basically taken the concept of no

governance no oracles nothing like that and applied it to a lending protocol in order for people to have I guess like this lending protocol that looks more like a uni swap than than an Ave for example because Ave has a governance process has oracles everything like that and I should disclose here that I'm an investor in ajnar and I invested in them because as I said on the refill plenty of times before there is this emerging kind of like new set of default protocols that uh oracles that are focusing on reward assets that are trying to do different things to what we've seen in the past and I'm not calling it D5 3.0 I've said before I I don't think we should we should coin that term but they are newer protocols and they're innovating here there's another one called volantis which is building a new type of amm that I've

I've also invested in so that's why I'm excited about these I I I think D5 has has been in in dire need for at least a couple of years now of some fresh Innovation and I'm finally seeing it uh especially around real world assets and make Adele funny enough is actually at the Forefront of that even though they're an older protocol and I know they've come under scrutiny uh scrutiny for a bunch of different things in the past but I think they're on the right track with when it comes to real world assets so yeah I mean by the time you've watched this maybe azna's live so you should definitely go check it out but just wanted to put that on your radar uh in case you you you missed that one there all right so just the last thing here sismo has uh announced today that

they've officially shifted their entire Focus uh on making zero knowledge proofs available to all Builders ZK badges are powerful yet it is sismo connect that will unlock a whole new design space for Builders today we are sharing our learnings and I did mention this I think a couple weeks ago about how sismo has basically gone from just for uh to a more generalized um service such as zero knowledge proofs as a service and they're detailing this um in in more depth in this blog post here which you can check out for yourself so I just figured this was a follow-up to what I talked about a couple weeks ago and how you can check this out and uh and and read it and learn all about that there but I think that's time for today so that's going to be it thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to

subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone